How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?

This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.

This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users. We’ve included this ranking within parenthesis next to each country in the charts below for those who want to know.

These 50 countries together have more than 1.8 billion Internet users.

Why connection speeds matter

Why would you be interested in knowing how Internet connection speeds are distributed among various countries? Here’s why:

• As an Internet user, you can get an idea of how your own Internet connection speed holds up against others in your country.
• As a Web service provider or website owner, you get an idea of what kind of Internet connection speeds your customers are likely to have in different countries. This is highly relevant if you want them to have a positive user experience. This naturally applies to web developers in general as well, who should be well aware of the capacity of people’s Internet connections.

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Online video has significantly contributed to the growth of the market for content-delivery networks, two new research reports show, but it’s unclear how much the industry as a whole will benefit from this trend going forward. The worldwide value of CDN services is estimated to reach more than $2 billion in 2011, In-Stat reported today. That’s up from $1.25 billion in 2008. In-Stat attributes this growth largely to the increasing popularity of online video.

Those numbers are echoing similar predictions from competing market research outlet AccuStream, which is predicting CDNs to bring in $1.16 billion in 2010, up from an estimated $1.37 billion this year. However, the price war for online video delivery has actually resulted in video becoming a smaller piece of the cake in terms of percentage of overall revenue. And then there’s the big unknown: How will Apple’s and Microsoft’s plans to shoulder more of their data delivery in-house affect the industry? Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

P2P CDN solutions for online video used to be all the rage last year. Literally dozens of start-ups were pitching their unique flavor of BitTorrent to facilitate video streams and save content and platform owners some dough.

One of those companies was Mediadefender, better known for spamming BitTorrent sites with fake files in oder to prevent file sharing of major movies and albums. Mediadefender initially tried to go into the consumer space with its own P2P-powered video hosting site Miivi.com, but that ended in a disaster because people were assuming the site was set up to catch file sharers.

The company retreated, and eventually started to pitch its own P2P CDN solution dubbed Picast. Well, to make a long story short: Picast is no more. The Picast.com website is still up, but the project itself wasn’t mentioned at all when Mediadefender announced its rebranding as Peer Media Technologies last week.

I wanted to know more, and asked whether Peer Media Technologies is still trying to get into the P2P CDN market. Here’s what a representative of Peer Media’s parent company ArtistDirect told me:

”Picast is a great technology but we have decided to focus primarily on anti-piracy services for the time being.”

I wouldn’t be too surprised if other P2P CDN start-ups closed shop in the coming months as well.